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Thursday, September 12, 2013

Naturally Sweet & Gluten Free Desserts: Interview with Ricki Heller

Ricki Heller's new cookbook, Naturally Gluten Free Desserts is being released this month, and she graciously agreed to answer a few questions from me. Her answers are thoughtful and interesting and give some great insight into what to expect from the new book!

1- Your new cookbook features delicious desserts that
are vegan, and for the most part, free from many of the top allergens. Why was
it important to you to create recipes that are free from so many commonly used
ingredients?

Most
importantly, Naturally
Sweet and Gluten-Free is my response
to so many of my former customers when I ran an organic bakery, as well as to current
readers of my blog. The number of people with food allergies or
dietary restrictions continues to grow every day. I know there are a lot of
people out there who have a hard time finding all kinds of foods they can eat,
including tasty desserts. For me, there’s nothing quite as gratifying as
hearing from someone who tells me they used my recipe for their child’s
birthday cake, or served my brownies at a pot luck, and everyone loved them and
was able to enjoy them without worrying about allergies.

In addition,
the recipes simply reflect the way I now eat, so you could say they come
naturally to me. My diet is a variation of the anti-candida diet (for people
with yeast overgrowth in the body), and it requires foods low on the glycemic
index so blood sugars remain stable. It’s also a low allergen diet, since part
of the purpose is to reduce the toxic load in the body so it can focus on
healing itself. I’ve been eating a vegan diet for many years, adding
gluten-free and sugar-free within the last ten years or so.

2- What types of desserts are featured
in your new cookbook? What can a reader who is not familiar with your past work
expect from this new cookbook?

The book
contains every kind of baked good and sweet treat you can imagine, with
variations on most of the classics. So there are chocolate chip cookies,
brownies (five different kinds, actually!), cinnamon buns, pecan pie, cheesecake,
muffins, pancakes, scones, ice creams, puddings. . . basically, any kind of
dessert or breakfast baked good, revamped so that they are free of eggs, dairy,
gluten, corn, yeast or high glycemic sweeteners. And everything is made from
whole foods, unprocessed ingredients and natural sweeteners—nothing artificial
in anything!

In addition,
some of the recipes include atypical ingredients (such as veggies hidden in
sweet treats), or grain-free sweets, such as the coconut flour biscuits or raw brownies,
which will appeal to people on lower carb diets.While some of the ingredients, such as
coconut sugar or millet flour, may not be familiar to some readers, they can
all be found at health food stores and online, or easily substituted with more
conventional ingredients (such as all-purpose gluten-free flour or more common
sweeteners instead of coconut sugar and coconut nectar).There’s an entire chapter on ingredients and
substitutions; and the recipes themselves contain clear step-by-step instructions
with lots of helpful hints and tips to guide you as you go along, even if
you’re a novice baker.

3- Which recipe from the new cookbook is
your personal favourite? Why?

Oh, that’s such a tough question, because my most recent recipe creation
is always my favorite! I’m going to fudge the question a bit and give you my
three top picks if that’s okay.

I’m a chocoholic, so I will start with a brownie! I love all five
brownie recipes in the book, but my go-to would have to be the Sweet Potato Brownies.
They’re fudgy, dark, dense and just all-around great—a perfect treat to serve
any friends who might be skeptical about “special” diets!And if you like, top them with the
Allergy-Friendly Chocolate Buttercream Frosting, made without grains, dairy,
eggs, sugar, nuts, corn or soy, another favorite. I’m also a huge fan of
breakfast and brunch, so I’ve made the Carob-Buckwheat Pancakes with Chopped
Almonds and Carob (or Chocolate) Chips countless times. Finally, I just love
the Butter Tarts (a Canadian classic, normally made with butter, sugar, eggs,
brown sugar and corn syrup, sort of like pecan pie without the pecans). Have
you ever heard or a rich, gooey, decadent butter tart without gluten, eggs,
butter or sugar? Well, that is one to try! My hubby tells me they taste just
like “the real thing,” too.

Hmmm. . . I guess that’s actually four recipes! Sorry about that. ;-)

4- You are a long-time advocate of the
vegan diet. What advice would you give someone thinking of going vegan?

Just
remember that there’s such a thing as vegan junk food, too—and be careful what
type of food you eat! When I first started eating a vegan diet in my 20s, I had
no idea about nutrition or the need for sufficient protein in my diet, and I
believe that’s part of the reason I got sick.Focus on whole, real foods, and you should do just fine.And it’s a good idea to read a couple of
books on the subject, such as Becoming
Vegan by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina, or Vegan for
Herby Virginia Messina and JL Fields, to help you
navigate all the different nutrients and ensure that you’re eating a healthy
diet. It’s not difficult, but it does require some knowledge.

5- You eliminated gluten from your diet
several years ago. Can you explain why you made that decision and how it has
improved your overall health?

I was
required to give up gluten during the first stage of the anti-candida diet, as
a way to minimize potential allergens in the body.Although I never thought I had a problem with
gluten, as soon as I removed it from my foods, I began to feel better. Symptoms
such as bloating, stomach pain and irritable bowel syndrome seemed to resolve
themselves naturally. On the few occasions, in the beginning, when I did eat
gluten again, the symptoms immediately returned, sometimes within minutes. I
decided I’d continue eating gluten-free because it seemed to be the best option
for me.

I also much
prefer baking with gluten-free flours compared to wheat flour. Look at all the varied
options you have with gluten-free flours! The possibility for different tastes
and textures are endless. With wheat flour, it’s basically the same outcome,
all the time. How boring is that?

6- Often, substituting ingredients can
be expensive. What advice can you give to those cooking or baking with food
restrictions, but who need to stick to a budget?

There really
are ways to keep the costs low. I always buy in bulk if I can, and freeze my
nuts or seeds so they will last (I also freeze any flours that I won’t use
within a few weeks, since gluten-free flours are mostly whole-grain, which
means they contain volatile oils that can become rancid if left too long at
room temperature). I make my own all-purpose gluten-free flour mix (the recipe is also in the book) instead of buying
the packaged all-purpose gluten-free flour, which can be very expensive. And
it’s surprisingly easy to make your own flours from whole grains, too, as long
as you have a coffee grinder or spice grinder!

I find that
if you stick to real, whole foods, your costs are inevitably lower. In other
words, an apple is cheaper than applesauce; whole millet is cheaper than millet
flour. And since so many products contain additives or potentially suspect
ingredients anyway, it really does make more sense to create as much as you can
from scratch.

Using only whole foods ingredients, a generous
pinch of humor and input from her two chatty canines, Ricki shares gluten-free,
allergy-friendly and sugar-free recipes on her blog, RickiHeller.com. Ricki’s second cookbook, Naturally
Sweet & Gluten Free, will be released in September, 2013. Her first
book, Sweet Freedom, is one of only three
cookbooks recommended by Ellen DeGeneres on
her website. Ricki is also an Associate Editor for Simply Gluten-Free Magazine and has written for Clean Eating magazine, Allergic Living, Living
Without, VegNews, and many other publications. Ricki lives near Toronto, Canada with her
husband and two dogs.